Albanese and Starmer stare down populism

ABC Listen.

Podcasts, radio, news, music, and more.

In just a few months, the entire global order has shifted.

Canada would be great as our cherished 51st state.

The US has started threatening its traditional allies and cozying up to its traditional enemy, Russia.

Do you respect Putin?

I do respect him.

Do you?

Why?

Well, I respect a lot of people.

So, what does Donald Trump get out of all this?

I'm Matt Bevan, and on my show, if you're listening, we try to detangle the chaos of the world so that you really understand it.

Find new episodes on ABC Listen every Thursday.

A regal encounter for a prime minister on the world stage.

Anthony Albanese hoped his meeting with the King would attract attention for their desire to defend democracy.

But it was his rallying cry to the British Labour Party that's raised eyebrows back home.

So was it a diplomatic outing to meet the UK's leaders or a chance to rub shoulders with his lefty mates?

Welcome to Politics Now.

Hi, I'm Brett Worthington, filling in for PK.

And I'm Jacob Greber.

Good to see you again, Brett.

Lovely to see you, Jacob.

What did you reckon about beers for Kia?

Four packers,

elbows face on them.

What is it, Willie the Boatman or something?

I think that's like one of those Marrickville products

from the Prime Minister's electorate.

Is it a humble brag being able to rock up with your your face on a can?

It's not bad, is it?

Do we need a bottle of sort of Brett

Wollinger or something like that?

I think he got an Arsenal top in return.

So it was a good weekend for...

So thereby losing half the Australian population that hates Arsenal or whoever.

I don't speak British football, but presumably that's the danger with these things.

It is, but I believe they had a win.

So the Prime Minister will be up and about.

We'll get to his meeting with Keir Starmer in a second.

But if we start with his encounter with King Charles, he headed up to Balmoral for an audience with the King, as is typically the case here.

We don't really get to find out too much about what the two discussed, but what did you make of a visit to Scotland to see the King?

Look, I think that's part and parcel of it.

The King is,

you know, still plays this essential role

in our particular democracy and structure.

So yes, you would expect a visit.

And also

you then inevitably get the question about the Republic.

It's just one of these pantomimes we go through.

Prime Minister, of course, making it clear one referendum.

It's quite enough.

I'm not going back there.

I wonder if he thanked the King for the shout-out to AUKUS when he was addressing Donald Trump the other week.

Whether or not that curries any favour, I guess we'll wait and see.

It was very useful, very useful for the government because it's still waiting on this AUKUS review to come out of the US Pentagon.

There's still uncertainty about how much more Australia is being expected to put into defence.

That conversation is very much unresolved.

We'll be talking about it a lot, I suspect, between now and when the Prime Minister goes back to Washington for this meeting in October with the President.

So, yeah, look, I think having the King in all their finery, I mean,

how about that banquet hall?

Now,

that's a home ground advantage, isn't it, when it comes to diplomacy?

You can really

lay it on for a while.

For a man who likes that level of pageantry,

I think it works great.

And then, of course, we've seen the Prime Minister with Starmer, Sakir Starmer.

We've seen him with Mark Carney.

Some people have called it the sort of lefty love-in.

But it's also, this is, and I think we talked about this last week, Brett, this is the counter-programming to the MAGA movement, the equivalent in the UK, Nigel Farage, and you're seeing it all through Europe as well.

So it was overtly political.

Let's make no bones about it.

And the Prime Minister's getting some criticism for elements of his trip in the UK.

Why is he doing these overtly political things?

But he's a world leader now.

You know, he gets to play.

He gets to play on this stage.

He's got 94 seats and he's not shy about it, notwithstanding what he might have said about Scott Morrison back in the day appearing at a MAGA rally with Doris.

It's an interesting period that we're going to have from Anthony Albanese.

He's going to spend a lot of time on the world stage in this back end of the year.

In his first term, there were clear sensitivities about him going away a lot.

The Airbus elbow.

He hated that reference being thrown around.

And I think he is clearly aware of when that criticism is being leveled.

But when you've won a whopping majority and you've got the chance.

And he needed to be at the UN thing.

He had a lot to say there about the social media ban, that's a world first, and of course the climate and Palestine.

So, you know, none of that falls into the indulgent camp, I don't think.

Is it clear to you why that he went to the Labour conference over?

So that's where the discussion then gets a little more pointed.

The opposition's questioning that.

They're saying saying that that is an overtly political thing to be doing, and perhaps he should have paid for his own ticket up to, where was it, Liverpool?

I'm sure that argument will go back and forth.

And the problem for the Prime Minister on that is that he made a very similar criticism of a former coalition prime minister when he went to,

it was a box factory that was being opened, but it really did look and feel like, and I was covering it at the time, so I remember it well, Scott Morrison standing there, I must say, looking kind of semi-sheepish, but as this thing sort of built and there was the Donald Trump theme song came on, the famous, you know, I'm proud to be an American

with our Prime Minister standing there.

So look, yeah, you get pulled into these things.

It's fair game.

The Prime Minister now, he's copying some criticism.

I wouldn't say it's a lot, but he's copying some criticism.

And that's, yeah,

he'll have to answer that.

If we look at these meetings that we saw at 10 Downing and getting together with those progressive leaders that they've been talking about, so it sits fresh after Anthony Albanese had that big outing at the UN where the focus was on recognising of Palestine, of working with Keir Samar and the Coalition of the Willing to really defend Ukraine, to try and broker peace.

We saw him sit down with Tony Blair and there's the talk about the peace plan for Gaza and what role Tony Blair might be having part of that.

Do you think that we will see the kind of fruits of a trip like this in the kind of shorter term or is this kind of a longer term project that you think the Prime Minister is working on here?

I think it's a longer term thing.

He's ascendant, you know, he's at the top of the pile.

And Keir Starmer was ascendant really only a year ago and is now in serious strife domestically.

The immigration problem in the UK, they've really struggled with it.

So I think it was the speech that Albanese gave was really a pep talk, it felt like, for the progressive side of politics,

where if you're from that perspective, the news hasn't been great in the last few, you know, the last year or so with Trump coming back.

And you can see little pockets of a fight back, I guess you could say.

I think Gavin Newsom,

the California governor, springs to mind as someone who's using very Trumpy social media.

Have a look at it.

It's worth looking at.

He likes to troll Trump with Trump's own.

And he's using the same kind of techniques that Trump has has used so there's a there's there's sort of a fight back there and I think Albanese feels when he stands there that he's part of that now

that that might come back and haunt you down the line But at this point, he's not worried about it.

He's leaning into that.

And this is very much his idea of what you do on the global stage when you have this kind of power.

And we all know it's very brief.

That level of influence and that level of authority can be fleeting in this business.

And so he's using it.

He's using it to the best of his ability.

And Anthony Albanese kind of reminding the British Labour Party of, I'm going to go to the election twice in between your one-hours.

Do you think he was a bit jealous?

Do you think there was actually a bit of jealousy there?

With a whopping majority and a five-year term, you'd think, my goodness,

I'll be having a holiday wherever I like.

Speaking of referendums we're not going to have, I mean, he does sort of,

he would like long fixed terms, I think, compared to what he has to deal with.

I think think it's probably a great hope but one that won't be realised.

One of the themes that we have seen coming through this British part of the trip in particular and meeting with people like Keir Starmer and Mark Carney is the rise of the right.

In the UK the Prime Minister decided not to meet with Nigel Farage who at least according to the polls is likely leading.

He sat down with Kemi Badenock, the Conservative leader, the official opposition leader.

But it is a common through line that we are seeing particularly through the UK, through parts of Australia's political discourse, and even in the US, the ways in which the right is reorienting our mainstream politics.

Do you think that that is something that is catching on in Australia as much as it is in some of the other parts of the world?

There are differences, I think, that you've got to bear in mind between Australia's political ecosystem and the ones we're talking about in the UK and the US.

I mean, we have a data point.

It's called May 3.

Yes.

So these issues didn't come after that.

They were around.

Peter Dutton certainly tried to play some of those cards and they didn't appear to work.

But

if the mood changes, if people feel economically less secure, if they feel borders aren't being protected, if they feel that national security is not being looked after, you can see a scenario where it starts to turn in that direction.

The only thing is that a Farage type political movement,

we don't have a first-past-the-post system as they do in the UK.

Our system's nothing like the US system, where you need the base really is the whole game,

not the middle.

And of course, we've got compulsory voting.

Right, mandatory and preferential really kind of changes that paradigm, which is why some of the liberal hardheads would say, don't worry about one nation, where we will gain their preferences back.

And this drop that you've seen in the coalition primary down to record lows isn't catastrophic just yet, clearly cause for concern because if it is just filtering across to one nation, you will likely collect those back again through with the preferences.

Yes, but the Prime Minister's, you know, he's coming at it from the perspective of, I think, the other really interesting part of his speech to that conference was:

if Labor governments don't deliver on the things they say they're going to deliver, if they don't lift living standards, then you do create an opportunity for populist movements.

And if governments

fail to

lift living standards in a way that people feel it soon, it's going to be very difficult.

And he talks about how it takes time for these things, these policies to be felt.

Now, Starma's been in for one year.

He's under enormous pressure on immigration.

That problem predates him, but he's being blamed for not getting on top of it.

Albanese has gone to this conference and said, look, here we are.

We were in a similar position.

prior to this last election in our first term.

We're under a lot of pressure.

We were accused essentially of not focusing on what mattered to people.

We were doing the voice and other things.

They've turned that around and I think

he's trying to provide that as an example for the British Labor Party.

How are you seeing this moment for the mainstream Conservative Party side of politics and what would that mean for these incumbent prime ministers?

Look,

the traditional brands that we're familiar with in politics are in trouble.

That is true of the coalition and they're really struggling here to rebuild themselves.

27% primary, I think is what the most recent news poll had them at.

That's actually worse than what they were at the election.

So they've gone backwards since the May election.

Now sometimes you get that effect where voters actually decide, yeah,

they did make the right decision in going against the coalition in their minds.

And so it actually continues that momentum.

The danger for the coalition, I think, and I don't know what you think, but if they can't resurrect their brands, then it does open the door to more third-party movements.

It does make it much, much harder for them to ever get back into government.

And then at some point, it becomes a question of the viability of the party itself.

Now, we've just had a week where Andrew Hastie has been busy talking about a bunch of issues that he thinks are important, get rid of net zero, go back to car manufacturing, clamp down on immigration, sort of, you know, real, real solid, what you would call populist type positions.

And he said, I think, in one of his posts, you know, we may lose the party, so be it.

So I think what he's saying is actually reflected in conversations I have with people in the coalition.

There is a sense, there is a worry, including from the ones who lost their seats and the ones who are there now, that if that this is a very, very difficult moment for them that could potentially, you know, inconceivably end in the Liberal Party falling apart and something else taking its place.

What that is, no one really knows.

Yeah, it's definitely a question where you've got this contest of ideas about what the soul of the party is and looks and sounds like.

And you've got people like Andrew Hastie and others who are saying it needs to be more leaning into the conservative side of politics here.

Whereas others you speak to that sit on that front bench say, my children only voted for us because I'm a MP.

They would tell me, to my face, your party doesn't reflect us.

You're anti-climate change, you're anti-women, you're anti-business in the perception that's being put forward.

So you don't reflect who we are.

And this will be the great existential question that I guess Susan Lee will have to navigate over this next term of Parliament as long as the party allows her to fight out that battle.

I did an interview with Amanda Vanstone last week

that we used for our PAC on Thursday night, 7.30.

You can go and look at it.

She makes a very similar point about the youth and

who is the party appealing to?

What is it offering this new generation that's coming through?

Now, the coalition's always had a strong base in the baby boomers and the prior generation.

Older people have tended to be more conservative.

Women tended to be much more supportive through the 60s, 70s, into the 80s.

Women were, and actually from the beginning, let's be honest, from when Menzies first created the party.

That's changed.

A lot of those votes have gone.

Whether they ever come back is another question.

You can see where those votes have gone.

They're called the teal independence and the

community independence.

So, how they get those back,

is it an Andrew Hastie type figure?

Someone like Amanda Vanstone, I think, would tell you probably not.

But who knows?

We'll have to wait and see.

Well, we saw the script writers in the UK foreshadow what was to happen to Jimmy Kimmel and to Stephen Colbert with the TV show Hacks.

Maybe the writers of Total Control in Australia knew

what was to come.

I think one last thought, too, on this.

I think the size of that 94-seat win that Labor had obscures a little bit how vulnerable they were in a number of seats to what you might call teal on red violence in political terms.

Mostly we think of teals as taking out Liberals.

They came awfully close.

You could throw a stone from where we're sitting here at Parliament House, and you could almost reach one of those.

I mean, they came awfully close to losing Bean, which is the seat you're talking about in southern ACT, and then the seat of Fremantle in Perth.

There may well be, those seats may well be gone for Labor at the next election.

And there may be others.

There may be other seats where this independent type brand is more attractive to voters.

And it's always a preference game.

It's very tight.

The margins are minuscule when you're talking about the way these seats come about.

So, yeah, I don't think this is a problem just for the Liberal Party, although for them it's absolutely threatening their existence.

Yeah, another pressing issue in the here and now are these pharmaceutical tariffs.

So over recent months Donald Trump has threatened a you know it could be a 250% tariff.

It could be something smaller.

It could happen in 18 months.

What he's landed on is a hundred percent tariff.

It's going to come in on Wednesday.

It's on pharmaceuticals going into the US.

If you've got if you've broken ground and you're building a manufacturing plant then you can get a carve out.

Our biggest exporter which is the backbone of pharmaceutical sales to the US is the company CSL but plasma and blood products are the biggest amount of work that they're doing there.

And we saw Mark Butler, the health minister yesterday, can see there's still a lot of confusion over what is going to be captured as part of this.

Do you think it raises the stakes for that prime ministerial visit?

Yeah, well, it will certainly be on the agenda.

And this is the model.

You know, at least the one advantage of Albanese, the Prime Minister, not having had a meeting, is he can see exactly how this operates.

So you line up your meeting and then inevitably there's some kind of ask or threat or demand or whatever.

And then you go to the meeting and you solve it.

It's that play.

You create tension.

A four pack of elbow beers isn't going to cut it here.

He's going to take the Dice Coke.

And he's a teetotaler as well.

I don't know.

Do we have some unique soda pop that he might have?

There'll be something in Anthony Albanese's Electric.

Some Donald Trump snake bite cordial or something from, I don't know.

But you look, the drug thing, the company you mentioned, CSL, says it already has a lot of manufacturing and is building more manufacturing in America.

So I think they feel they can counter that.

The numbers themselves are not gargantuan.

So in terms of effect on the Australian economy, I think

you wouldn't find an economist who thinks there'll be any actual impact.

Ultimately, the biggest impact on this is for American consumers of healthcare products.

They will be paying more because, I mean, some of these factories you can build pretty quick.

So

maybe that is the response.

But in the interim, your prices for this stuff goes up.

But on the PBS, this is sort of overhanging threat.

The Americans hate the Australian pharmaceutical benefits scheme.

So shortly.

So

when I say Americans, I mean the American pharmaceutical industry hates it because the difference between you and me negotiating as individuals about the price of a giant pharmaceutical company's latest oncology drug or the Australian government with its purchasing power on behalf of, what are we, 26 million people.

That's what we're talking about.

The Australian government is the buyer of these drugs ultimately on behalf of the Australian people, whereas in a system where you don't have a PBS, it's essentially the individual.

And so that's why the pharmaceutical industry in America thinks that's an unfair advantage to them.

They would argue it's a punitive measure that's been taken here, but the Australian government responses, well, it doesn't matter where it's coming from, whether you're negotiating with a company here in Australia or a foreign company, this is the universal approach that the government is taking.

And like you said, during the last campaign, it was a bipartisan push to

not just preserve the PBS, but make medicines that are listed on there cheaper as well.

I think there's also two parts to it where you've got the domestic political element of we saw even before these pharmaceutical tariffs were announced, Kevin Hogan, the trade spokesman for the coalition, was out setting the bars of what he wanted the Prime Minister to achieve in that meeting.

So he wants Australia to get a deal like the UK has on steel and aluminium.

Now they're saying the Prime Minister needs to be taking action in terms of getting these pharmaceutical tariffs, if they are being imposed on Australian businesses, cut out.

But there's also that bigger economic picture that we've talked a lot about since Donald Trump's return.

The Treasury in Australia, its concern was not that inflationary one of any short-term impact as a result of the trade war, but what this would mean for businesses and they're willing to invest over the course of these next four years.

And even if Australia is not necessarily captured by this pharmaceutical tariff that's being imposed, it does cause concerns for large parts of the business community about whether there is a reliable environment with which they should be looking to invest in as well.

And that's, I guess, the question I have: what economic impact does that have in Australia if it is the flow-on of people are putting their wallets away and just saying things are too unpredictable?

I don't know they'll put their wallets away.

I mean, I would look at what happened under the when the Chinese government was slapping tariffs on us, punitive tariffs, they explicitly said so to punish us for opposing their positions on various things.

The wine industry started to substitute into other markets, likewise the barley growers.

I'm not saying that's without pain, it is.

It's economically painful, but they all survived, they all found new buyers for their products.

And I suspect

this announcement today will make some of our drug companies look at other markets in Europe and Asia and double down on those markets.

America is a big economy, but it's not the only economy.

There's the rest of the world.

There's something like 85% of global trade.

So there are other places to go.

But I don't know.

Do you think there's a political reaction in Australia when these types of measures are levied by the Trump administration?

I think the great unknown is he's a very unpopular figure, Donald Trump.

And so...

I'm not sure what the downside in a political sense is for the Labor government as a result of these decisions that are being taken by Donald Trump and to what extent households are kind of going, oh, the government's just dealing with this chaotic scene that you're seeing coming from, whether or not the coalition can turn that into a political attack.

It has been muted a lot by the fact that the two are going to meet and they're going to have a standalone meeting.

So whether or not there's hay to be made for Susan Lee and the opposition, I think is very much yet to be seen.

But we saw late last week, Susan Lee putting out a social media video, really trying to tap back into those themes about the cost that to see back here at home.

Do you think that's what the Prime Minister will jump jump on the moment he gets back into the country, kind of get out there to remind people he is here and is aware that that is a concern that remains?

Well, I'm sure he will.

Energy bills are edging up again.

Looks like the Reserve Bank won't deliver another rate cut, certainly this week, they're meeting.

None of the bank economists expect that to be a reduction in the interest rate, and they're pushing back when there might be one or two more.

So that's feeling like it's tapped out at this point.

And that will not be good news to households that have large mortgages.

They'll be worried about that.

And that's why inflation has been great for the federal budget because those higher prices mean that the money that's flowing into the government coffers is inflated.

And we've seen the Treasurer and the Finance Minister today put out the final budget outcome for the last financial year, and the deficit is in a much better position than what it was forecast to be.

So it's about a third of what the previous year is.

It's around about 10 billion.

10 billion.

Down from 27, I think, wasn't it?

There is an element of that, which is the economy's in better health than was forecast back in May of last year.

That's the year we're talking about.

Those numbers were first given to us then.

And since then, you know,

the employment market's held up, so there's fewer people on unemployment benefits.

And then, of course, commodity prices have continued to outperform what was expected.

Yeah, I think iron ore is up about 40% of what it was expected to be.

Coal is up about 40%.

Iron ore is 75% up on what the budget was estimating it to be.

And that's such a massive windfall that helps the budget improve much more quickly.

Now what the opposition is saying is that had the government constrained or been a little more, in their words, disciplined around spending, you could have seen this as a surplus.

Like in budget terms, a $10 billion figure could easily have landed as a $10 billion surplus.

And then the government would have been able to say, we've delivered three surpluses in a row.

So there might be some wondering whether there could have been a few tweaks they could have made along the way that would have landed them into yet another surplus.

Politically that would have been quite a different message.

So they're focusing on the fact that this is not as big of a deficit as it was expected.

And the bit that's sort of unclear to me, it sits in an environment where we've seen AFL grand final at the weekend.

We've got school holidays, you've got the NRA.

That was a football on, wasn't it?

I can't talk about it.

I go for Geelong.

My dad had a milestone birthday.

He goes for Geelong.

It was a terrible weekend in Mildura.

Whether or not people are paying attention, you know, maybe that's a benefit for the government, but it's also sort of your ability to benefit from having good economic news is unclear to me.

But

if the budget might be well and good, but if you're still feeling that pain in the house, whether or not you're willing to give anybody credit for that, I think.

No, that's right.

And this is the danger for the government.

Budgets are abstractions.

It's a high-level thing.

But if there's a narrative that had the government been a little more tight on its spending perhaps in the last year,

had they perhaps wound back some of the programs very difficult to do in an election year, of course, and we've got to bear that in mind, then it would be a surplus and then maybe there would be more room for interest rate cuts

from the Reserve Bank's point of view.

Now that if economists are going to argue this point, but if households feel, yeah, yeah, you know, we could have lower interest rates today, that's when it's real, that's when it feels real to them,

not an abstract discussion that we have here in Parliament House about the budget.

So whether or not there's hay to be made for Susan Lee and the opposition, I think is very much yet to be seen.

But one of the issues that they're clearly trying to jump on, and we'll have more on this throughout the week, is what is happening with Optus.

We saw another outage this time in the New South Wales Illawarra region, so south of Sydney, and 9 to 12, some of the calls haven't gone through to emergency services.

Now everyone was able to be welfare checked on.

But the Communications Minister, Wells is going to meet with the board tomorrow.

There is something that Melissa McIntosh, the Coalition Front Prentice, is very keen to jump on.

And if they can be more assertive in issues against the government, it means they're going to be spending less time talking about themselves.

Well they definitely need to spend less time talking about themselves.

All that does is undermine Susan Lee.

Any discussion about the coalition is ultimately a discussion about why they're in the position they're in and then it ultimately goes straight straight to the leadership question and so the less they what Susan Lee needs is a bit of clean air as as as we sort of say in this business where it's not about them so something like Optus is a is a is a good point for them to jump on and I'm sure they will be how much how much people blame the government for what's happened here I don't know this looks like a you know pretty bad mistake by this company multiple times and so the pressure's on them to fix it yeah Andrew Hasey is taking some days off.

He's on leave.

So, Susan Lee will be

happy to get that clear air.

I don't know how many others are not taking leave this week.

Let's see.

Let's wait and see.

It's only Monday, mate.

Well, that's right.

That's all the drive we've got for today, Jacob.

Thanks for joining me.

Thanks so much, Brett.

And back tomorrow, we'll have the latest on what's happening with the OPTAS situation and those meetings with the communications minister.

If you do have any questions, though, please do send us a short voice note to the partyroom at abc.net.au and Mel Clark and I will answer them for you on Thursday when we record the party room.

See you, Jacob.

See you later.